There are quaint places about the square, where insurgency reigns and finds expression, where existing conditions are denounced, where freedom is verbally fought for and capital and conventions are vocally annihilated.  In some of them food is served at prices which astonished his training at the expensive restaurants.  There the musician and the girl went, he as explorer, fastidiously critical, yet enduring what he regarded as squalor and anarchy, for the new experience of feeling that he was penetrating Bohemia.

She acted as guide, and since she knew the world of ease and the world of necessity and could walk alike with the aristocratic and the commonalty—­and remain equally herself—­she sat amused, watching him as he watched the rest.  The twinkle that sought to flash into her eye flashed only in her mind, but the play of keen humor and wit quaintly expressed sparkled through her conversation, so that when they were together they laughed a great deal.

Acquaintanceship which is nourished in the sunlight of laughter blooms rapidly into intimacy, and Paul Burton would have been surprised had he known how often his eyes wakened into a tell-tale glow of delight and admiration, and how easily any one looking on might have fallen into the egregious error of construing his attitude into one distinctly loverlike.  All this while she continued to pique his curiosity by a sustained reserve as to herself.

She spoke quite frankly of her failures to get employment, making deliciously laughable stories out of disappointing and disheartening experiences, but it was only in incidental comments that she referred to things in the past which made him know that her life had once held in abundance those things which it now lacked.

One day when Paul had selected with great care a mass of roses of a new and particularly exotic variety to be sent to Loraine, the florist inquired, “Will that be all today, Mr. Burton?”

The musician had nodded, then suddenly he said, “No, I think there is something else I want.”  It suddenly came to him that he had never given Marcia any sort of present.  Of course she would have no use for a small cart-load of expensive flowers.  One had to send gifts of that sort to Loraine, because she was herself so gorgeously expensive, but Marcia might like some violets.  Violets would look rather well on the blue suit she most often wore.  He was to meet her in a half-hour, though he had not mentioned the appointment to Loraine.  So he had the violets wrapped up, feeling somehow a sort of diffidence such as he had never felt before when giving flowers to women, and took them with him.

It was crisp afternoon and as he reached the square a small hand waved to him and he saw her walking briskly along by the arch, so he ordered the car stopped, and jumped out.

“I was just coming over for you,” he said.  “It would have been a disaster to have missed you.  Barola is giving a violin recital at Carnegie Hall.  Shall we run up?  There’s just time.”